“Five Red Herrings” by Dorothy L. Sayers

Dorothy L. Sayers is called – by right – one of the queens of the detective story genre. Lord Peter Wimsey – her own version of a sleuth who never makes mistakes – deserves no less admiration than his more famous colleagues Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, being a person of an incredibly sharp mind and high moral values. He is also an aristocrat, but not the arrogant kind: he enjoys mixing up with all kinds of common mortals and treats them – naturally and genuinely – as his equals. He can be quite stern when his investigation requires it, but most of the time he is just a gentle person anyone would love to spend some time with.

I’ve read two Lord Peter Wimsey books, and never dreamed of the real identity of the murderer until I reached the end, which is my definition of a great detective story. “Five Red Herrings” is definitely a masterpiece. When I was reading it for the first time, I didn’t go to bed until 4.15 a.m. because I just needed to know who the murderer was.

The events described in the book take place in Scotland, in Galloway – a small community of painters and fishers. Lord Peter Wimsey can’t paint, so he has to fish from time to time to belong; so he does. One day though, an extremely obnoxious and unpopular painter named Campbell is found dead in a burn, an unfinished picture drying in the sun up the hill. It’s assumed an accident at first – it would be easier than easy for the painter to slip while working on his picture and fall down the slope breaking his neck. But Lord Peter Wimsey has a different opinion. Murder, he says. The police believe him, since his capabilities in the field of investigating murders is well known. Lord Peter Wimsey gets to work helping with the investigation.

Among the residents of the place there are many who might wish Campbell dead, but six of them have especially strong motives. And it so happens that they all disappear on the day of the murder, only to be found later, five of them with the most incredible stories of where they had been. The sixth of them has an airtight alibi… unless he had an accomplice. Each of them could have committed a murder. Well, whodunit?

Dorothy L. Sayers’s English is far less smooth than the language of her contemporary writers like Agatha Christie or Patricia Wentworth. It’s rougher, harder to understand – and in the case of this particular book the difficulties are increased by the fact that most of the characters talk with a strong Scottish accent, which the author faithfully reproduces in writing. I soon learned to substitute “where” for “whair”, “know” for “ken” and “doubted” for “dooted”, but that wasn’t all. A cockney chaffeur wasn’t really a problem: being a foreign reader I might not understand spoken cockney very well, but I’m used to the written version of it – so many English writers seem to be fond of it. But a “reverse-cockney” butler was a bit of a surprise. His habit of adding an unnecessary H in front of every word supposed to start with a vowel wasn’t quite what I expected. And then, as if all the above weren’t already enough for this poor foreigner, the author brought in a fresh witness with a lisp and replaced every S and half of the C’s with a TH.

No wonder it was 4.15 a.m. when I finished. The mystery was worth it, however. I’d bet you’ll never guess the solution until you’ve read the book in its entirety – or, alternately, looked it up – and the stories of the five red herrings are fun in themselves. The characters are painstakingly drawn too, each of them as different from everyone else as we all are in real life – one has to marvel at the writer’s skill and imagination where it comes to inventing personalities, as, from what I understand, nobody of them actually copies any real person she might have met.

A highy recommended book.